“So we’re even.”
I put down the mug. “Nothing’s even when you’re being blackmailed. So, tell me, what’s the plan?”
“I need you to make me disappear,” he said, straight and to the point.
I raised my brow. “Disappear as in…?”
He took a quick sip of his coffee and stared down into the mug. “Ellie, I’m going to be honest with you.”
“Oh what a pleasant change of pace.” I sat back in my chair, utterly intrigued. Camden had been a master at hiding his emotions, but there was a tiny pulse of life at the corner of his eye, magnified by his glasses. I knew that pulse, that twitch. I had it myself. It was fear.
He ignored my sarcastic remark and spoke to the coffee. “I’m not in any trouble, because that’s the first conclusion you’re going to jump to. If I just carried on my life like this, running my shop and following orders,” I raised my other brow but let him continue, “then that would be that. My life would go on and no one would probably get hurt.”
He paused and picked up his pen and began to click the end of it, in and out, in and out. I waited. It was excruciating.
With a sigh he continued, looking everywhere except my face. “But I’m tired of my life. I want out of it. And it’s not the kind of life you can escape from. Not by normal means.” Click click went the pen. “After Ben was born…I did a bad thing. I had my reasons and I have my excuses. But it happened and Sophia divorced me. But no one’s truly free from Sophia. When you marry a Madano, you marry the whole family. And it’s a bad family, Ellie.” Click click. Click click. I eyed the painting of Sophia on the wall. “And they don’t let you go so easily, especially when you owe their sister child support. Do they care, really, how Sophie and Ben get on? No. They don’t. They’d turn on her in an instant. They just care about their image. Their pride. Their family values. And so they said they were doing me a favor. I didn’t have much money back then. Even with LA Ink and the increase in business, I barely got by. LA is an expensive city and they knew I could never make enough there. So they came to me with a deal. They’d give me a shop anywhere I wanted as long as it was in a low-rent town with a couple of paying customers. They’d give me my dream.”
“Sins and Needles,” I said quietly.
“Yes,” he said, finally looking at me. “They gave me this place. But as you now know, everything comes with a price. They said they wanted me to do well and then give most of my earnings to Sophia and Ben. I didn’t have a problem with that, I’d give them everything if I could. But I wondered, if they had the money to buy a shop, why didn’t they just give her the money outright? Well, they said it was because it had to go through me, because I owed her, not them. And then the truth came out, about two weeks into running this shop. Business was slow. Terribly f**king slow. I had a handful of customers and that was it. This goddamn town, it just isn’t the place to make a life. It’s still not.”
“So what happened?” I had a feeling I knew where this was all going, and to be honest, I was starting to feel a bit bad for him.
“I started to panic a little. Vincent came by, that’s her oldest, that’s the guy you never want to see in a bad mood. He flipped the sign over to Closed, and I was so certain he was going to bash my brains in or something. I can do well in fight, believe me, but that’s someone you never want to cross.”
This Vincent was starting to remind me of my Javier. That wasn’t good. Funny how we had both been wrapped up with bad people at the same times in our lives.
“He asked me about my sales and I told him the truth. I couldn’t afford to lie. He owned this building for crying out loud. But, instead of cutting off my finger, he just smiled and shrugged. Like it was no problem. Then he brought out his briefcase, opened it up, and showed me the shitload of money inside. He told me that it was the real reason this business existed, and as long as I held onto the money for him and made slow deposits into my bank account, their bank account, the business would keep going. It didn’t matter how many people wanted tattoos. All that mattered was that, to the outside, it looked like Sins and Needles was making a lot of dough.”
“Money laundering,” I stated the obvious. “Of course, of course this is just a front.”
He glared at me. “I could have done well somewhere else. I could have done really well. I’m not the problem. The town is the problem.”
“I think you’re at least part of the problem,” I dared to say. “You’ve been cleaning money for a few years now, haven’t you?”
He sighed sharply and took an angry gulp of coffee. “I couldn’t say no.”
“You can always say no.”
“Do you always say no?”
“Not lately.”
“Anyway,” he said, the impatience in his voice rising. “So every week or two a new deposit comes in. I deposit the cash. It looks like I’m making money. Then they take out the cash and they leave me my allowance. I don’t have a say in it but it’s enough to get by on. Then they say they’re giving so much to Sophia and Ben.”
“And you don’t believe them…”
“No. As I said, their love of family is only for appearance’s sake. I doubt Sophia is getting very much, if any.”
“Don’t you think she’d let you know if you were stiffing her?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know. She doesn’t answer my calls or my emails. All I can do is send letters in the mail to Ben. I just hope he’s getting it. Anyway, I don’t know what would happen if I asked. She might tell her brothers and they’d get pretty insulted if they knew.”
“Right.”
“And so that’s that. I want out.”
I almost laughed at his bluntness. “Camden. You can’t just get out from something like this. Money laundering is a very serious crime. What are the Madanos into? Drugs? Guns? Prostitution?”
“Does it matter?” he asked wearily.
“Sort of. You have to know where the money is coming from. You have to know the type of people you are dealing with, because like it or not, you’re in business with them.”
“I know the type.”
“But you don’t know their type. You’re the bank. They’re the boss. Who’s their client? What’s their product? Who’s buying what? It all matters.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”
I shook my head in thin amusement and finished the rest of my coffee. “Let’s just assume it’s drugs then. I’ve had enough experience with that angle. So then tell me what your plan was before I came along. Or were you always just sort of waiting for me?”
His gaze was sharp. “I wasn’t waiting for you. I saw you in the coffee shop that day and then everything snapped into place, just as everything snapped into place when you saw me.”
“There’s been a lot of f**king between us over the last few days,” I mused bitterly.
“Don’t flatter yourself. I’m the one f**king you, that’s why you’re sitting here with me, ready to do anything I tell you to.”
“And what we did in the backyard and the floor and the bedroom?”
He grinned wolfishly. “Oh, you never even had a chance to f**k me back.”
I was going to retort something extremely childish like, “oh yeah, that’s because you only gave me five minutes” but the truth was I had nothing to stand on. The sex, believe it or not, had actually meant something to me. I didn’t sleep with him to get access—I would have gotten that anyway—I slept with him because I was starting to like him. Because I wanted to. Because he was one of the sexiest men I’d ever come across. And it was a shame he still was. It was a shame that none of it meant anything. It was a shame that, despite the rather dire situation I was in, I was smarting like some stupid girl who thought she had something more than a one-night stand.
Get your head out of your vag**a, I told myself and sat up in the chair a little straighter. I smiled at him, trying to get to the root of the matter.
“All right, so then you saw me and you knew I was going to do something stupid and try to screw you over, right?” I asked.
“Right,” he agreed simply. “Then I started to think how I could make this all work in my favor. I didn’t just want to catch you, to prove that you’re not as smart as you think you are. I wanted to get something from you in return. Then I thought of Gualala.”
“What the hell is Gualala? Is that another band?”
He smiled at me like I was an idiot. “Gualala is a town just north of San Francisco, on Highway One. I went there after high school, just bumming around the coast for a bit. I fell in love. Gualala has been my motivator. It’s the goal. It’s the place I’ll go when I want to start over.”
“You’re starting to sound like Morgan Freeman in Shawshank Redemption.”
I said the wrong thing.
Camden grabbed the French press, and in a fit of rage, hurled it against the wall where it shattered into a million pieces of glass and steaming liquid. My heart was fighting with my lungs, my muscles tensed to run. I watched him, eyes wide, afraid to breathe. He was back to being terrifying again.
Definitely not a Morgan Freeman fan.
“Just because we are talking over coffee, do not for a second think that you aren’t royally screwed,” he hissed at me, eyes blazing. “Don’t for a second think I’m going to go soft on you, that I’m going to have a change of heart. You broke my heart, Ellie, all those years ago. That was the last time you’d ever see it.” He sat back, took off his glasses, and calmly began to wipe them off with a napkin. I could see from the way his hands were shaking that being calm was taking an awful lot of effort on his behalf but I was grateful for it. “This isn’t a joke. And this isn’t a game, no matter how hard you try and figure out the angle and the play. I’m playing you, do you understand me? I’m the one in control.”
My voice trembled. “Okay.”
“Okay. So now you know what I need. I want to leave this place and I want to leave it with their money. I want to leave and never look back. I want to be able to open a trust fund for Ben, something he can have when he’s older. An anonymous donation. I want to live on the Pacific Ocean and eat at my favorite restaurant and work on my art all day. I don’t want to be Camden McQueen anymore. I want to be someone else. And I want you to make all of this happen.”
It was nearly impossible, extremely risky, completely dangerous and the tallest of the tall orders. But I was done making light of it. I was done pretending that Camden was putting on an act and that he just wanted to scare me. This was no act. I would have to help him disappear, or else I’d disappear too. And not to a place I wanted to go.
“Fine,” I said, clearing my throat. “I’ll help you. I’ll help you get all of that. But I think I’m going to need some of your trust to make this happen.”